Asia Pulse,June 26.
COLOMBO, June 26 Asia Pulse - An offshore oil strike in Sri Lanka is still some years off with opportunities for local business to support a petroleum industry even further away, during the development phase, a senior official said.

The country lacks a clear vision for the petroleum sector and private industry should get more involved in the search for oil and provide policy inputs to the government, said Neil de Silva, head of the petroleum resources development secretariat overseeing exploration efforts.

With the island having a narrow continental shelf, potential hydrocarbon deposits are in deep waters.

This makes them less attractive to oil majors and more expensive to extract, he told a seminar on management of Sri Lanka's ocean resources organized by the Chamber of Construction Industry Tuesday.

Sri Lanka has a 60 per cent chance of discovering oil in the Mannar Basin, off the west coast, "not a bad number," de Silva said.
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hindustantimes.com,June 25, 2008.
he secessionist organisation the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) continues to use child soldiers in its battle against the Sri Lankan armed forces, the defence ministry said on Wednesday. It added that the LTTE forcibly recruit children and teenagers to fill up their fast-depleting ranks.

Quoting defence intelligence sources, the ministry said personnel of the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) recovered three “obituary posters” giving the name, rank and unit of 150 LTTE cadres, including those of several child soldiers in the Karakakulam area in the northern part of the country. They found the posters after capturing the office of an LTTE regional leader.
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bloomberg.com,June 26.
June 26 (Bloomberg) -- Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who intensified the fight against rebels over the past two years, said he will negotiate with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam if the group gives up its armed struggle.
``If the LTTE lays down arms at any moment, I am ready to work with them to achieve peace,'' he told religious leaders in the capital, Colombo, according to a statement on the Defense Ministry's Web site yesterday.
The LTTE said last September that any peace process must be based on a homeland for the Tamil people, in the same way the ethnic-Albanian majority in the former Serbian province of Kosovo gained independence. Tamils make up 11.9 percent of Sri Lanka's 20 million people, according to the 2001 census.
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Sri Lanka's government sets up committee to investigate claims of media intimidationAssociated Press,Tue June 24, 2008 10:44 EDT .
KRISHAN FRANCIS - Associated Press Writer - COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - (AP) Sri Lanka has appointed a ministerial-level committee to investigate allegations that local journalists trying to cover the country's civil war have been threatened and harassed, a senior government official said Tuesday...